Provided voice for animated films and tv series: The
Return of the King ... A Story of the Hobbits (tv movie) (Arthur Rankin Jr.
and Jules Bass 1979); The Wind in the Willows (tv movie) (Rankin and
Bass 1986); Gobots: Battle of the Rock Lords (1986); "Mad as a Hatter,"
"Perchance to Dream" (1992), episodes of Batman: The Animated Series;
"Inherit the Wimp" (1993), episode of Darkwing Duck; "Enter the Madkat"
(1993), episode of Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron; Red Planet
(animated miniseries) (1994); "Tick vs. the Breadmaster" (1994), episode of The
Tick; "Trial," "Lock-Up" (1994), episodes of Batman: The Animated Series;
"The New Olympians," "Seeing Isn't Believing" (1996), episodes of Gargoyles;
"Apocalypse Not" (1996), episode of Duckman; "Snowball" (1996), "Brainwashed,
Part 2: I Am Not A Hat," "Brainwashed, Part 3: Wash Harder" (1998), episodes of
Pinky and the Brain; "Knight Time" (animated; voice) (1998), episode of Superman;
A Bug's Life (animated; voice) (John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton 1998).

Directed: The Devil's Widow [Tam Lin]
(1971).

There are many strange and sad stories to tell about Tinseltown,
but few are stranger and sadder than the story of Roddy McDowall. He was
a star as a child actor, but grew to adulthood realizing that he would never
be a star again. As he found it harder and harder to keep getting roles
in major films, he lost an almost-guaranteed and potentially career-reviving
Academy Award for his supporting role in Cleopatra (1963) when he
wasn't nominated due to someone's stupid mistake. A potential move into
directing ended after one, disastrously unsuccessful film, and his efforts
to keep working soon transformed him into a mainstay of science fiction,
fantasy, and horror films and television, almost inevitably in minor, and
sometimes mortifying, roles. At a stage in his life when lifelong actors
should be receiving honors and shining triumphantly in occasional starring
roles, he was hard at work providing voices for television cartoons like
Darkwing Duck and Pinky and the Brain.

All right, you
say, there are many performers in or destined for this volume whose careers
followed similarly downward trajectories. But damnit, Roddy McDowall was a
really good, and at times brilliant, actor, so that you constantly wondered why
he was the fourth banana instead of the star. After all, there were few
performers in Hollywood who could be intelligently cast both as the Devil (in
an episode of Fantasy Island) and as Saint Peter (in Unlikely Angel),
and few who could have provided a persuasive performance, and served as the
solid foundation for an enduring film franchise, while buried under ape makeup.
If he was simply asked to fidget, as was often the case, he would do it with
unfailing stamina; but he could do a dazzling variety of other things as well,
however rare those opportunities might have been. Most astonishingly, he always
appeared to enjoy the miserable genre movies and television shows he found
himself in, appeared to be perfectly happy just where he was, even when that
couldn't possibly have been the case.

There is therefore a mystery in McDowall's career that the available biographical
data cannot resolve. We are told that he was a tremendously popular fellow
in Hollywood among the stars who welcomed him into their homes as a party
guest and a photographer (which became a second career for him). Yet he
was visibly stepped on often enough to suggest that he was greatly disliked
as well. Rod SERLING's The Twilight Zone
relentlessly reused the talented actors it attracted; McDowall was effective
in one first-season episode, but never returned. In Batman, he
was appropriately larger than life as the villainous Bookworm, but unlike
other first-season Bat-villains, he was never asked to play the part again.
One consistently observes McDowall in small roles playing opposite lesser
talents in larger roles that he would have been ideal for. What were the
casting directors thinking? Was there some desire to deliberately humiliate
the man, as punishment for his early successes or his unchronicled personal
failings? Having been treated like dirt for so long, was there a dark
satirical intent in hiring McDowall as the voice of "Mr. Soil" in A
Bug's Life?

We may forever
wonder why he wasn't given more to do, but we will always be able to appreciate
what he was allowed to do: in the Planet of the Apes films, his most
memorable performances; in the Fright Night films, where he convincingly
functioned a father-figure for the genre of horror movies; in The Legend of
Hell House, where the role of a man scarred by a horrific experience in his
childhood may have seemed especially poignant to him; and in innumerable lesser
films sporadically energized by his presence. No matter what Hollywood thought
of him, in my book, he will always be a star.